The Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee yesterday issued an ultimatum to the National Women’s League, saying that if talks between the committee, the league and the Ministry of the Interior fail to produce substantial results before Dec. 26, the committee would deal with the league as it does Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) affiliates.
The committee criticized the league for postponing negotiations on an administrative contract that is to be signed between the committee and the league, which would set out penal measures if the league’s chairpersons are found to have hidden assets.
The deadline for concluding negotiations was last month, but was extended by a month after league chairwoman Cecilia Koo (辜嚴倬雲) reportedly threatened to withdraw the window for negotiation, allegedly due to her reluctance to give up control of the assets personally entrusted to her by league founder Soong Mayling (宋美齡).
“Over the past few months, the committee has exercised patience and extended goodwill to settle disputes and facilitate reconciliation, but discussions over the National Women’s League must not be allowed to drag on indefinitely,” the committee said.
“If the negotiations fail to yield substantial results by Dec. 26, when a committee meeting is to be held, the committee is to make its decision according to the law,” it added.
The purpose of transitional justice is not to persecute, but to establish historical facts behind a nation’s transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy, thereby bolstering democracy, it said.
The committee thanked the ministry — the league’s governing body — for mediating between it and the league since July.
A source close to the matter said that the main contributing factor behind the deadlock is the league’s unbridled decisionmaking process, which has caused the league’s members to repeatedly overturn agreements.
Koo is furious over the clause that aims to punish league chairpersons over asset-hiding and has requested that the clause be changed so that punishments would be assigned to the league as a whole, rather than to individual chairpersons, the source said.
In related developments, the committee yesterday said that new evidence that Broadcasting Corp of China (BCC, 中廣) is a KMT-run enterprise has come to light.
The committee released results of its ongoing investigation into BCC, which showed that Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in a September 1960 KMT Central Committee meeting gave the company instructions to step up psychological warfare against China.
BCC officials during the meeting advised the KMT administration to renew the company’s mission, the committee said.
“Newspapers and other media cannot compare to broadcasting when it comes to fighting a psychological war. The party should review and correct its current broadcasting policy,” the committee’s investigation report showed Chiang as saying.
Chiang had also in a 1963 Central Committee meeting instructed that the KMT’s renewal of its contract with the BCC should ensure that all of the company’s expenses are covered by the government, as it “was assisting in government affairs by waging psychological warfare against China and broadcasting propaganda to the world,” the report said.
The report cited a passage from the book 60 Years of BCC, which said the company vowed to “be loyal to the party-state and to contribute to society.”
“Let us not forget that we are a party-run cultural company. We must fight for the KMT’s outstanding cause and the Three Principles of the People it practices,” it said.
In Highlights of the BCC, published in 1978, the company said it “had never forgotten that it is a model enterprise operated by the party,” the report said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods